Of open air, and the life behind those words
‘Open’ and ‘air’. I remembered her aghast,
Foetal, shaking, sweating, shrunk, wet-haired,
A beaten breath, a misting mask, the flash
Of one wild glance, like ghost surveillance
From behind a gleam of helicopter glass.
A lifetime, then the deathtime: reticence
Keeping us together when together,
All declaration deemed outspokenness.
Favourite aunt, good sister, faithful daughter,
Delicate since childhood, tough alloy
Of disapproval, kindness and hauteur,
She took the risk, at last, of certain joys –
Her birdtable and jubilating birds,
The ‘fashion’ in her wardrobe and her tallboy.
Weather, in the end, would say our say.
Reprise of griefs in summer’s clearest mornings,
Children’s deaths in snowdrops and the may,
Whole requiems at the sight of plants and gardens …
They bore her lightly on the bier. Four women,
Four friends – she would have called them girls – stepped in
And claimed the final lift beneath the hawthorn.
Höfn
The three-tongued glacier has begun to melt.
What will we do, they ask, when boulder-milt
Comes wallowing across the delta flats
And the miles-deep shag-ice makes its move?
I saw it, ridged and rock-set, from above,
Undead grey-gristed earth-pelt, aeon-scruff,
And feared its coldness that still seemed enough
To iceblock the plane window dimmed with breath,
Deepfreeze the seep of adamantine tilth
And every warm, mouthwatering word of mouth.
Tate’s Avenue
Not the brown and fawn car rug, that first one
Spread on sand by the sea but breathing land-breaths,
Its vestal folds unfolded, its comfort zone
Edged with a fringe of sepia-coloured wool tails.
Not the one scraggy with crusts and eggshells
And olive stones and cheese and salami rinds
Laid out by the torrents of the Guadalquivir
Where we got drunk before the corrida.
Instead, again, it’s locked-park Sunday Belfast,
A walled back yard, the dustbins high and silent
As a page is turned, a finger twirls warm hair
And nothing gives on the rug or the ground beneath it.
I lay at my length and felt the lumpy earth,
Keen-sensed more than ever through discomfort,
But never shifted off the plaid square once.
When we moved I had your measure and you had mine.
The Blackbird of Glanmore
On the grass when I arrive,
Filling the stillness with life,
But ready to scare off
At the very first wrong move.
In the ivy when I leave.
It’s you, blackbird, I love.
I park, pause, take heed.
Breathe. Just breathe and sit
And lines I once translated
Come back: ‘I want away
To the house of death, to my father
Under the low clay roof.’
And I think of one gone to him,
A little stillness dancer –
Haunter-son, lost brother –
Cavorting through the yard,
So glad to see me home,
My homesick first term over.
And think of a neighbour’s words
Long after the accident:
‘Yon bird on the shed roof,
Up on the ridge for weeks –
I said nothing at the time
But I never liked yon bird.’
The automatic lock
Clunks shut, the blackbird’s panic
Is shortlived, for a second
I’ve a bird’s-eye view of myself,
A shadow on raked gravel
In front of my house of life.
Hedge-hop, I am absolute
For you, your ready talkback,
Your each stand-offish comeback,
Your picky, nervy goldbeak –
On the grass when I arrive,
In the ivy when I leave.
‘Had I not been awake’
Had I not been awake I would have missed it,
A wind that rose and whirled until the roof
Pattered with quick leaves off the sycamore
And got me up, the whole of me a-patter,
Alive and ticking like an electric fence:
Had I not been awake I would have missed it,
It came and went so unexpectedly
And almost it seemed dangerously,
Returning like an animal to the house,
A courier blast that there and then
Lapsed ordinary. But not ever
After. And not now.
The Conway Stewart
‘Medium’, 14-carat nib,
Three gold bands in the clip-on screw-top,
In the mottled barrel a spatulate, thin
Pump-action lever
The shopkeeper
Demonstrated,
The nib uncapped,
Treating it to its first deep snorkel
In a newly opened ink-bottle,
Guttery, snottery,
Letting it rest then at an angle
To ingest,
Giving us time
To look together and away
From our parting, due that evening,
To my longhand
‘Dear’
To them, next day.
Chanson d’Aventure
Love’s mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book.
I
Strapped on, wheeled out, forklifted, locked
In position for the drive,
Bone-shaken, bumped at speed,
The nurse a passenger in front, you ensconced
In her vacated corner seat, me flat on my back –
Our postures all the journey still the same,
Everything and nothing spoken,
Our eyebeams threaded laser-fast, no transport
Ever like it until then, in the sunlit cold
Of a Sunday morning ambulance
When we might, O my love, have quoted Donne
On love on hold, body and soul apart.
II
Apart: the very word is like a bell
That the sexton Malachy Boyle outrolled
In illo tempore in Bellaghy
Or the one I tolled in Derry in my turn
As college bellman, the haul of it there still
In the heel of my once capable
Warm hand, hand that I could not feel you lift
And lag in yours throughout that journey
When it lay flop-heavy as a bellpull
And we careered at speed through Dungloe,
Glendoan, our gaze ecstatic and bisected
By a hooked-up drip-feed to the cannula.
III
The charioteer at Delphi holds his own,
His six horses and chariot gone,
His left hand lopped
From a wrist protruding like an open spout,
Bronze reins astream in his right, his gaze ahead
Empty as the space where the team should be,
His eyes-front, straight-backed posture like my own
Doing physio in the corridor, holding up
As if once more I’d found myself in step
Between two shafts, another’s hand on mine,
Each slither of the share, each stone it hit
Registered like a pulse in the timbered grips.
Miracle
Not the one who takes up his bed and walks
But the ones who have known him all along
&nbs
p; And carry him in –
Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked
In their backs, the stretcher handles
Slippery with sweat. And no let-up
Until he’s strapped on tight, made tiltable
And raised to the tiled roof, then lowered for healing.
Be mindful of them as they stand and wait
For the burn of the paid-out ropes to cool,
Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity
To pass, those ones who had known him all along.
Human Chain
for Terence Brown
Seeing the bags of meal passed hand to hand
In close-up by the aid workers, and soldiers
Firing over the mob, I was braced again
With a grip on two sack corners,
Two packed wads of grain I’d worked to lugs
To give me purchase, ready for the heave –
The eye-to-eye, one-two, one-two upswing
On to the trailer, then the stoop and drag and drain
Of the next lift. Nothing surpassed
That quick unburdening, backbreak’s truest payback,
A letting go which will not come again.
Or it will, once. And for all.
from Route 110
for Anna Rose
I
In a stained front-buttoned shopcoat –
Sere brown piped with crimson –
Out of the Classics bay into an aisle
Smelling of dry rot and disinfectant
She emerges, absorbed in her coin-count,
Eyes front, right hand at work
In the slack marsupial vent
Of her change-pocket, thinking what to charge
For a used copy of Aeneid VI.
Dustbreath bestirred in the cubicle mouth
I inhaled as she slid my purchase
Into a deckle-edged brown paper bag.
III
Once the driver wound a little handle
The destination names began to roll
Fast-forward in their panel, and everything
Came to life. Passengers
Flocked to the kerb like agitated rooks
Around a rookery, all go
But undecided. At which point the inspector
Who ruled the roost in bus station and bus
Separated and directed everybody
By calling not the names but the route numbers,
And so we scattered as instructed, me
For Route 110, Cookstown via Toome and Magherafelt.
XII
And now the age of births. As when once
At dawn from the foot of our back garden
The last to leave came with fresh-plucked flowers
To quell whatever smells of drink and smoke
Would linger on where mother and child were due
Later that morning from the nursing home,
So now, as a thank-offering for one
Whose long wait on the shaded bank has ended,
I arrive with my bunch of stalks and silvered heads
Like tapers that won’t dim
As her earthlight breaks and we gather round
Talking baby talk.
‘The door was open and the house was dark’
in memory of David Hammond
The door was open and the house was dark
Wherefore I called his name, although I knew
The answer this time would be silence
That kept me standing listening while it grew
Backwards and down and out into the street
Where as I’d entered (I remember now)
The streetlamps too were out.
I felt, for the first time there and then, a stranger,
Intruder almost, wanting to take flight
Yet well aware that here there was no danger,
Only withdrawal, a not unwelcoming
Emptiness, as in a midnight hangar
On an overgrown airfield in late summer
In the Attic
I
Like Jim Hawkins aloft in the cross-trees
Of Hispaniola, nothing underneath him
But still green water and clean bottom sand,
The ship aground, the canted mast far out
Above a sea-floor where striped fish pass in shoals –
And when they’ve passed, the face of Israel Hands
That rose in the shrouds before Jim shot him dead
Appears to rise again … ‘But he was dead enough,’
The story says, ‘being both shot and drowned.’
II
A birch tree planted twenty years ago
Comes between the Irish Sea and me
At the attic skylight, a man marooned
In his own loft, a boy
Shipshaped in the crow’s nest of a life,
Airbrushed to and fro, wind-drunk, braced
Rubbing his eyes to believe them and this most
Buoyant, billowy, topgallant birch.
III
Ghost-footing what was then the terra firma
Of hallway linoleum, grandfather now appears,
His voice a-waver like the draught-prone screen
They’d set up in the Club Rooms earlier
For the matinee I’ve just come back from.
‘And Isaac Hands,’ he asks, ‘Was Isaac in it?’
His memory of the name a-waver too,
His mistake perpetual, once and for all,
Like the single splash when Israel’s body fell.
IV
As I age and blank on names,
As my uncertainty on stairs
Is more and more the lightheadedness
Of a cabin boy’s first time on the rigging,
As the memorable bottoms out
Into the irretrievable,
It’s not that I can’t imagine still
That slight untoward rupture and world-tilt
As a wind freshened and the anchor weighed.
A Kite for Aibhín
after ‘L’Aquilone’ by Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912)
Air from another life and time and place,
Pale blue heavenly air is supporting
A white wing beating high against the breeze,
And yes, it is a kite! As when one afternoon
All of us there trooped out
Among the briar hedges and stripped thorn,
I take my stand again, halt opposite
Anahorish Hill to scan the blue,
Back in that field to launch our long-tailed comet.
And now it hovers, tugs, veers, dives askew,
Lifts itself, goes with the wind until
It rises to loud cheers from us below.
Rises, and my hand is like a spindle
Unspooling, the kite a thin-stemmed flower
Climbing and carrying, carrying farther, higher
The longing in the breast and planted feet
And gazing face and heart of the kite flier
Until string breaks and – separate, elate –
The kite takes off, itself alone, a windfall.
In Time
for Síofra
Energy, balance, outbreak:
Listening to Bach
I saw you years from now
(More years than I’ll be allowed)
Your toddler wobbles gone,
A sure and grown woman.
Your bare foot on the floor
Keeps me in step; the power
I first felt come up through
Our cement floor long ago
Palps your sole and heel
And earths you here for real.
An oratorio
Would be just the thing for you:
Energy, balance, outbreak
At play for their own sake
But for now we foot it lightly
In time, and silently.
18
August 2013
Index
Alphabets, 90
Anahorish, 22
Anahorish 1944, 141
Anything Can Happen, 142
At Banagher, 133
At the Wellhead, 131
Blackberry-Picking, 7
Blackbird of Glanmore, The, 153
Bogland, 20
Broagh, 23
Call, A, 128
Casualty, 59
Chanson d’Aventure, 157
Clearances (from), 97
Clothes Shrine, The, 139
Constable Calls, A, 49
Conway Stewart, The, 156
Crossings (from), 114
Cure at Troy, The (from), 100
Death of a Naturalist, 5